ozborn

Agree for 12V car batteries, AA batteries, etc... but not for EV batteries.

The form has not standardized, they evolve quickly, they can not be purchased in the volume required by all producers, and a better battery and matching charging infrastructure is a major competitive differentiating factor among EV manufacturers.

Mongolia is probably not the exampke you are looking for... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/mongo...

It is not flourishing, it is underground and/or illegal in almost every country in the world. Your example of Libya shows just how badly governance has to break down in order for slavery to regain even a shadow of its former importance. The number of people enslaved has gone from substantial portions of humanity to a fringe activity, mostly on the margins of society.

The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me.

To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here?

Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.

There are models much larger than BERT with a much larger footprint, GPT-3 being the most well kniwn example.

Models like BERT aren't just trained once either when they are developed, but trained again with different domains, different parameters, different tasks in some cases. There is also fine-tuning (more frequent, less carbon intendive), so these are real environmental problems, and others have pointed them out.

For short haul (think ferries) the same calculations will make electric ships feasible when distance travelled is 1 or 2 order of magnitude less. Such ships already exist.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50233206

EIA projections are garbage and have been for years, go look at their own old projections if you want to verify this.

World coal consumption peaked in 2013, not sure why you believe it is coming back in 2050?!

Most of the new global energy production brought online is renewables, and has been for the last 4 years...The renewable fraction is also increasing. Not sure why you believe fossil fuel use will increase for the next 3 decades?!

Agree, except for I think natural gas for homes (cooling and heating) should be phased out sooner. Letting gas companies build new pipe infrastructure to new homes in warmer climates where induction cooking and heat pumps will do the job just fine is crazy. They are an easy, painless way to reduce carbon emissions and much cheaper for society now. Also likely cheaper for the home owner of the future as gas prices get more expensive.

Would love if governments could better appreciate the value of open source and free software. Some sort of granting process that could determine which projects are worth funding on a sustainable basis would be wonderful. It's a great opportunity for access to technical expertise, avoiding vendor lock in, lowering costs and international collaboration if done right.

Done poorly, it's throwing good money down a drain - but I would think the ROI would at least be as good as scientific grants (for which it is usually hard to get any type of sustainable infrastructure funding).

The Huntsville area (including Redstone) is booming - there is a lot going on there in terms of space infrastructure. I think Huntsville is on track to surpass Birmingham (the city) as Alabama's largest. Political will is much less important now.

I can't speak to the Stennis Space Center other than to say it needs a new name...

It's configurable on a Tesla.

Quick summary (obviously not comprehensive) relevant for self-interested white working class voter:

Relevant Democract policy: Minimum wage(+), Healthcare(+), Progressive Taxation (+), Affirmative Action (Diversity Ban)/California Prop 12 stuff (-)

Relevant Republican policy:Minimum wage(-), Healthcare(-), Progressive Taxation (-). Affirmative Action (Diversity Ban)/California Prop 12 stuff (+)

Relevant Democract Rhetoric: You are white supremacist deplorable hillbillies

Relevant Republican Rhetoric: You are "real" Americans and the backbone of this country

Which one would a white working class voter prefer?

Keep in mind the rhetoric is experienced every day in the relevant news/social media, whereas policy decisions and impacts are not... Even if most Democracts don't use that kind of language, it's the language that gets headlines and is reported/retweeted.

Finally, many policy consensus issues (with mainstream Republican and Democract support) such as military spending, worker hostile trade agreements, etc... mean that policy differences may not be as large as they appear. I also put healthcare as a (+), but often things like Obamacare may appear as a burden to many healthy working class voters.

Reference for this claim?

My understanding is that oeganic farming uses less inputs overall (including pesticides and herbicides ) and some organic farmers use no pesticides or herbicides at all depending on the crop.

The radical left in Spain (including even the Anarchists who were a significant poltical force at the time) supported the Republican government. The purges that took place on the left, were the purge of the POUM (Trotskyist, the group Orwell fought with) and then the CNT-FAI (anarchist) by the Communist party (Stalin/USSR). Both purged groups were considered to be to the Left of Stalin by all sides in the conflict, the purged groups certainly were definitely less authoritarian.

I think the point being made is that a deep network (GPT-3 was the example with 175B parameters) will (due to the virtue of its size) not have any 'local optima' in the sense that there is no traditional 'local' for these high dimensional places. This is because as the # of dimensions increases it is easier to move away from or towards both better or worse parameter sets. Thus optimization algorithms don't have to be concerned about being trapped in a 'local optima'. Also because there are many good parameter sets not all parameters even need be used to get good results, thus processes like distillation can work.

That's how it started for me, now it is constant. I'd look into high frequency hearing loss if it becomes more persistent.

The link you cite is a very rough estimate of CFR as described in the paper. CFR varies tremendously based on the underlying demographics of the population and the treatment available - it's unclear why you focus on this metric. COVID-19 in the United States and other countries as well will be (if it isn't already) the 3rd leading cause of death. This is something that many people will change their behavior around, whether that is "panicking" or not is unclear from your original post.

However, if folks are willing to wear seat belts (although in the vast majority of trips they are useless) for a less likely cause of death, many will put on masks, avoided crowded indoor spaces and practice better hygiene for the 3rd leading cause of death. This will occur whether legally mandated or not.

Agree with your comments regarding Norway and renewable energy.

However, I suspect that if the pipeline is built they will still ship via rail if it is profitable - thus the net effect will just be more oil coming from the oil sands.

The only scenario were a pipeline could help the environment (relative to the status quo - it's still bad) would be it rail usage was displaced by pipeline usage. This could be true only when the price of oil holds stable between a narrow range such that pipeline shipments profitable, but not rail shipments. The price is unlikely to ever hold at such a range long enough such that Suncor, etcf.. would adjust production to ship by pipeline only. High sunk capital costs have meant that historically these companies run close to full capacity regardless of price.

I'm a little puzzled by their methodology, it covered noninstitutionalized folks in Indiana over the age of 12, but the majority of deaths in Indiana were in nursing homes. Looks like they were just trying to do the best with the data they could get, but it's not a great estimate.

Your first point is not correct, there are about 3.5 billion smart phone users out there. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...

I had not heard that Thomas Jefferson was particularly violent in his slave holding vs other slave holders. A quick google search isn't informative either, do you have any source for that claim?

A more appropriate example of "anarchistan" would probably be Catalonia during the civil war in the 1930s. It has been written and discussed by Orwell, Bookchin and many others. Your point is well taken though, at the end it did function as part of a "regular" democratic government before being crushed in the civil war both by Soviet backed communists and Franco.

There has actually been a great deal of thought (and some practice) on provision of services and community grassroots organizations by some strains of anarchism. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.

I think it is more complicated than that, although I agree in some circumstances laws deter bad behavior. However many laws are passed to protect the bad behavior of the powerful. Moreover, under better environments people may organize themselves effectively with only cultural norms - not laws. Think happy families living together without any laws governing their behavior or tribes with cultural norms protecting a common grazing area.

Folks should parse the article and the platform carefully, it actually reads "existing and advanced nuclear". This could be interpreted as maintaining existing reactors and building advanced (fusion?) reactors and NOT building new fission reactors.

From my perspective this interpretation would be desirable (although probably wishful thinking) given that nuclear energy is too expensive in practise (really only existing plants are competitive with solar), too slow to construct (10 year average construction time in the US?!), centralized and generally poorly managed. The construction of new nuclear fission plants for grid power in the United States isn't going anywhere, since it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense. Yes, most of us on Hacker News know it is better than fossil fuels - but renewable energy is the new competition. Nuclear is going directly against solar with (or without) battery backup and it's been losing for years now - even China has slowed down the pace of construction.

Nuclear grid power advocates should take their arguments to Mars where they will actually have a case. Not much of an atmosphere to spin a turbine, far away from the sun and an environment that makes the Antarctic look like a Garden of Eden should anything go wrong.

This change allows cubs to be killed in their dens. Don't think the deliberate killing of children is legal anywhere.

I would suggest Crash, IMHO the best film on racism ever made.

An update on the construction and rationale of the Barakah nuclear power plant in UAE. Economic, environmental and political implications are discussed. Article is in Aljazeera and should be considered in the context of the current UAE Qatar relationship.

The parent post is referring to Native Americans in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_Californ...

Data use agreements often specify under what terms the data is held and destroyed. While people may still remember some data, the usual use case is large databases that can't be memorized. If someone revokes that data, that data would need to be removed from the database and all associated downstream copies. Failure to comply would open the door to legal penalties, which is the real stick.

Imagine for example, if the US or UK governments took corporate misuse of personal health data (https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18760935/google-medical-d...) as seriously as they currently takes video copyright violations by individuals....

There's a number of reasons I think, including: 1. The fossil itself is beautiful and outstanding

2. There is less pressure to produce right now given oversupply and shipping constraints in Alberta

3.Suncor cares more about its reputation than some of the other players in the tar sands

4. The Royal Tyrell Museum is well known to most Albertans, kids go there on school trips and it would likely seem like the obvious thing to do (stop work) when presented with such a find.

5. I have no idea if there is a finders fee, but that fossil is probably more valuable than anything that loader was processing all day.

6. It's a dinosaur - most folks find them pretty cool. :)